X-Message-Number: 14 From: Kevin Q. Brown Subject: CSNY meeting notes Date: 26 Aug 1988 The ALCOR NYC Discussion Group (Cryonics Society of New York) meets the third Saturday of each month and the latest meeting was on Sat. Aug. 20. Two interesting topics came up at that meeting that I would like to pass on to you. Plastination ------------ A new (biological) specimen preservation process called "plastination" has been patented in Germany by Gunther von Hagens. It involves injecting liquid plastic into the specimen (in a vacuum) in a way that also removes the water. It halts decay and keeps the specimen looking quite natural, at room temperature. Reportedly, the specimens are also preserved well at the electron-microscopic level. One person at the meeting showed a human brain slice (obtained from Carolina Biological) that was preserved using plastination. What does this have to do with cryonics? If a process of this type could possibly preserve a person's brain (at room temperature) approximately as well as cryonic suspension does (at liquid nitrogen temperature), then it would have enormous advantages. You would no longer need an organization that painstakingly (and expensively) maintains you at liquid nitrogen temperature for decades or centuries. You could instead be safely stored conventionally and cheaply. Somehow this sounds too good to be true. Can plastination possibly create sufficient cross-linking to slow room-temperature chemical reactions to the same rate as in liquid nitrogen temperature preservation without that cross-linking? I would be surprised. Nevertheless, if plastination does become a viable approach to preservation of a person's memory/personality, then it would be silly to pass it up. More information on plastination will be provided at the next CSNY meeting (on Sat. Sept. 17). Save Your Pets. They May Save You. ----------------------------------- The information used to reconstruct you from cryonic suspension may not necessarily all come from your brain. For example, some memories may be "weak" upon reanimation and may need some extra assistance, such as a videotape of you or some personal notes that you had written, to put them firmly back into place. Also, everyone who knows you has a great deal of information about you, much of it unconscious. Thus, having your friends and family cryonically suspended may also improve the quality of your reanimation, because extracting their information about you may provide clues to help improve the fidelity of your reconstruction. And if the information about you embodied in your friends and family can help, then why not your pets, too? - Kevin Q. Brown ...{att|clyde|cuae2}!ho4cad!kqb Note: You may have wondered why my instructions for posting to the cryonics mailing list said to include "CRYONICS" in upper case in the subject field of your message whereas mail you receive from me always has "cryonics" in lower case. This is done so that if (1) you use the mail "reply" command to send a reply to me only and (2) your mailer automatically generates the subject of your reply by prepending my message's subject field with "Re: ", then I will not accidentally interpret your message as a posting to the cryonics mailing list. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14